


inpensam

by handydandynotebook



Series: axecution [4]
Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Angst, Blood and Gore, Crack Treated Seriously, Dark Crack, Disembowelment, Gen, Gore, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Injury, Murder
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-18
Updated: 2021-02-18
Packaged: 2021-03-13 14:00:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,231
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29527452
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/handydandynotebook/pseuds/handydandynotebook
Summary: Exhaustion wins out at some point and Max eventually falls into a shallow, fitful sleep. It doesn’t take much to wake her up but something distinctlydoeswake her up. It’s a solid kind of noise, muffled through the walls.Is Billy back? Is Neil laying into him again?Max chews her lip. She doesn’t want to listen. She doesn’t want to but she is in a sling and that means she shares this side of Neil with Billy now, in a way she didn’t quite before. Max gets out of bed and hears another solid noise as she creeps to her door, daring to open it just a crack.
Relationships: Billy Hargrove & Maxine "Max" Mayfield, Susan Hargrove & Maxine "Max" Mayfield
Series: axecution [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2121561
Comments: 10
Kudos: 12





	inpensam

**Author's Note:**

> okay so i wasn't gonna write this bc i was gonna keep the potentially horrifying content limited to ferrum solitariam but...idfk, okay, gorror is my comfort zone. i think i'm just like a hermit crab who emerged from my old shell into a new shell and then after a min of chillin in the new shell, retreated back to my old shell. bc it's familiar and easier, and now i'm prolly not even making sense, so anyway, moving on. 
> 
> max's pov of axe snafu au murder night!! technically part 4 bc it's the 4th part posted, but uh, it's chronologically the 1st part, rly. the minute discrepancies between the following and ferrum solitariam are intentional-- max and susan do *not* remember these events the exact same way.

Max can’t sleep. The pills successfully dialed the pure anguish roaring in her shoulder down to a duller, more manageable pain but she just can’t get comfortable. She normally sleeps on her stomach but that’s impossible with this sling. Mom brought her extra pillows to keep her shoulder propped up and that helps some, but it’s still awkward when she isn’t used to sleeping on her back, partially upright. 

It isn’t just physical discomfort keeping Max awake. She’s still reeling. Still rattled. Neil attacked her. It was the first time he’d ever attacked her and he didn’t just slap her or smack her, he went right from zero to a hundred. He pulled her hair so hard some of it came out, left her scalp burning. He shot put her like an olympian right into the solid oak of her dresser, and she’d heard the snap before the pain hit but once it did, it was as powerful as a tropical tidal wave. The pain knocked the breath right out of her, sent her crumpling to the floor. 

Neil seemed surprised. He seemed so surprised for a mere heartbeat Max even thought he might apologize. But all he did was leave and on the floor she remained until Mom found her, trying her best not to cry and crying a little anyway. Max could barely move her arm at all and the disconnect from the limb to her will, its inability and her inability to fix it, disturbed her in a deep, inarticulate way. She felt the bones grinding with each fruitless attempt and all she could do was swallow her screams down with her sobs with the gelid fear any noise could draw Neil back to her room. 

It’s been hours and the chills are still chasing each other up her back, her stomach hard and cold. Max isn’t only rattled by what happened, what Neil did and how hurt she is, but…by her response to it. She lied to Mom. She told her it was a skateboarding accident and repeated that story for everyone at the emergency room. 

It felt wrong to lie. It felt like bile in her throat. It felt like she was protecting Neil. 

Max doesn’t want to protect him. She lied to protect herself _from_ him. Because if she told the truth, he could get mad, he could do something even worse.

It makes her feel like a coward because if she told the truth, Neil could’ve been the one to be punished. But it just didn’t feel like he would be. Neil’s never been punished for anything he’s done before. 

Max has more reasons to believe telling the truth would’ve ended in trouble for her rather than Neil. She’s a prisoner in her own home. She has been for a long time but tonight, arm in a sling and lie stale in her mouth, it cuts so damn deep it could almost make her cry again. Max doesn’t cry easy but on a night like this her tears are all tapped out. 

Exhaustion wins out at some point and Max eventually falls into a shallow, fitful sleep. It doesn’t take much to wake her up but something distinctly _does_ wake her up. It’s a solid kind of noise, muffled through the walls. 

Is Billy back? Is Neil laying into him again? 

Max chews her lip. She doesn’t want to listen. She doesn’t want to but she is in a sling and that means she shares this side of Neil with Billy now, in a way she didn’t quite before. Max gets out of bed and hears another solid noise as she creeps to her door, daring to open it just a crack. 

“I d-didn’t know you came back. I— I didn’t expect to see you until Monday.” 

Wait, it’s Mom? She sounds weird.

“Fuck. Jesus, what the fuck..." 

Now that is Billy. He sounds even weirder. 

She hears her Mom’s nervous tittering. It sounds like she lifts something up from the floor. Curious more than wary, Max pads out of her room. 

“I thought you were Neil, why are you home?” 

Billy doesn’t answer. The house is dark. Max goes for her light switch, fumbling a bit with her non-dominant hand in the black of night. She gets it on the second try. Uses the light to guide her from the short hallway that connects the three bedrooms to the slightly wider one that leads into the living room. 

At the mouth of the wider hallway is an incomprehensible scene straight out of a bad dream. Except it can’t be a bad dream because Max’s shoulder is throbbing again, pills apparently worn off. People can’t feel pain in their dreams, that’s why you pinch them to prove they aren’t. 

There’s a a wide, wet ribbon smeared on the wall that matches the puddling around Billy’s form, slightly curled on the floor. Mom stands over him, the axe from the garage in her hands. Max can scarcely process what she sees before she’s hurrying over. Mom’s attention whips to her and her mouth falls open as Max drops to her knees. Max looks at Billy then up to Mom, hands shaking and she says something. If it’s coherent or not she doesn’t know, but something makes its way off her tongue because Mom shushes her harshly and that’s when Max realizes there are sounds behind her too. 

Neil shuffling about in the master bedroom. Neil is awake. A door creaks open. Max’s blood turns to ice. 

Then Mom’s rushing down the hall, axe readied as if she’s a viking. It’s so surreal maybe it would be funny if it weren’t nightmarish because her mother is easily the least combative person Max knows. She can’t even squash bugs, she takes them outside in tissue paper. She’s timid as a mouse. Mom jumps at every loud noise, cowers from shadows on the wall, gives like bruised fruit beneath the slightest press of Neil’s thumb. 

If she wasn’t watching it, she wouldn’t believe it. Neil turns into the hall. His gaze falls to Billy. Mom swings scorpion-sting-fast, so fucking fast Max doesn’t see it so much as she hears it. The meaty rip of the blade cleaving through Neil’s gut. Mom wrenches it free with her entire body and the blood spurts forth like a jacuzzi jet. A small bundle of something pudges out of the wound. 

Neil’s hands come up to protect his face and Mom chops right through his fingers. The severed tips fall like cigar caps as the blade slices into his cheek. Her upper body whips back as Neil stumbles forward, her next strike splitting his eye clean in half. 

“Sus— hck!“ 

It becomes a gurgle, axe buried in his throat. Max becomes keenly aware of warm wetness seeping through her pajama bottoms. She looks down and realizes Billy’s blood is soaking past the fabric. 

The way he’s curled, his back is to all the action. He doesn’t see what Max does. He blinks up at her blearily, eyes half-lidded. 

“Your mom jus’ went Lizzie Borden on my ass,” he declares, breathy and vaguely awed. “Must’ve seen me pissing in her petunias…” 

Max swallows, follows the source of the blood. Billy’s hands are covering it. It looks like he reached right into a Benjamin Moore can of black paint. Black, not red. His blood looks oil dark in the poor light. 

“Let me see, let me help.” She doesn’t recognize her own voice. 

Mom whacks into Neil’s thigh and the crack must be bone. 

“No, it’s sliding.” Billy’s brows knit together as a fat bead of sweat rolls into the dimple of his fuzzy upper lip. 

Mom frees the axe and the splatter slaps the wall. 

“Sliding?” Max echoes and maybe she should just put her hands— hand —over his, but his are shaking so bad she doesn’t think they’re actually applying useful pressure. 

Neil tries to hit Mom but he’s stumbling sideways, half blind and gushing lifeblood. It distantly reminds Max of a tranquilized moose she saw on the animal channel. His hand thunks against the wall instead. The shorn stumps of his fingers leave sticky trails. 

“Sliding,” Billy repeats, voice quieter but breaths heavier. 

Mom swings into Neil’s stomach again. It makes one of the most repulsive noises Max has ever heard, like someone taking a barrel of fish chum and dumping it directly onto hard concrete. His guts tumble right out of him, bowels drooping to the carpet in long, messy loops. 

Billy’s answer wasn’t really an answer and he’s bleeding too bad for beating around the bush. Max nudges his shaky hands away, intent to put her own in their place. This is when she sees exactly what ‘sliding’ meant. 

Pale, glistening _something_ protrudes from the lower slash in his gut, textured and membranous. Max gasps and shoves it back. It’s slippery under her hand, saclike and lukewarm like the gruel Hawkins serves for hot lunch. It gets much warmer when she shoves even harder and her hand sheathes under the upper lip of the wound. 

The inhuman sound that rips itself from Billy’s throat burrows right into her bones, this indescribable horror that has Max choking. 

“Oh god, I’m sorry! I’m sorry, Billy, but it had to go back.” She doesn’t have to specifically identify whatever that was to know it was supposed to stay inside. 

“No,” he gasps out. “I’m sorry.” 

“Huh?” 

Billy’s doesn’t reply. He just keeps raking in air, rapid, shallow pants. His eyelids flutter, he looks like he’s gonna pass out and that makes Max’s stomach lurch. 

Neil is down now. Mom chops into him from above, unrelenting. She drives the blade back in almost as soon as she frees it. Max smells something shitty. Literally shitty, like sewage backup. She’s got her good hand plugged against the insides that want to come out but there’s another slash in Billy’s flesh a little higher up and it just keeps gushing inky blood that parts around the lower wound and soaks into the waistband of his jeans. 

She can’t free her right hand from the sling to staunch the bleeding with. She needs her other hand to get it off and she can’t just yank her hand out of Billy’s stomach. Even if she could, she can barely move her right arm at all, there’s no way that hand could apply enough pressure. She needs help. 

“Mom! Stop! You can stop now, Neil’s dead!” 

This Max can see clear as crystal. His chopped up innards lie in a mess between his bloody legs. He isn’t even twitching anymore. Mom keeps hacking into him and even the noises are different now. It just sounds like she’s hitting something dead, slack wet sponge mass. There’s even more blood around Neil than there is around Billy. Looks like enough to fill her old kiddie pool.

“Help me with Billy!” Max demands and it’s only in this moment she realizes how scared she is as. “He’s dying too!”

“Neil still has his head!” Mom calls back, blood flying from the axe as she whips it over her shoulder, speckling the wall. She brings it down again. 

“What!?” 

“Neil still has his head!” Axe comes up, swings back down. “I need to cut off his head!” 

Mom sounds terrified, words squealing out of her in trapped animal desperation. Max’s heart twists as she realizes her mother seriously thinks Neil’s going to get up and retaliate. Mom’s chopping into a corpse and she can’t even tell. Carnage litters the carpet beneath her feet, Neil’s intestines are literally strewn and stewed between his blood splotched legs, one of his sheepskin slippers stumbled out of and soaked in the puddle. Mom's in the middle of all of it and she can't even tell. 

“Neil is dead, I promise! You don’t want Billy to die, do you!?” 

“No, no, that was an accident!” Gasping, Mom lowers the axe to her side and scampers back from Neil. She stares at him a moment, like she’s ascertaining what Max promised. 

Max shifts so her knee is pressing down on the other wound. It puts her in an awkward position but it’s better than nothing, she has to do something. She isn’t sure how conscious Billy is anymore. His eyelids still flutter but he’s not really looking at her, at anything. He’s washed out, face all sweaty, hair sticking to his cheeks. 

Max glances up when Mom’s shadow falls over her. She’s as bloodied as Carrie on prom night. It’s all over her pajamas, splashed over the slender column of her neck. Her hair is all wild like Max has never seen before. Bizarrely there is a tooth tangled in the mussy tendrils over her shoulder. It should be a joke but it's so far from. 

“Oh dear,” she babbles fretfully. “Billy saw me. He wasn’t supposed to be home but he saw me, I-I have to—“ 

Mom breaks off as she lifts the axe. It happens so fast Max can’t even protest. Near as she is to the blow, some blood flecks her face. She doesn’t know if it’s Neil’s or Billy’s. Neil’s blood was already on the axe but Billy’s definitely bleeding, gash opened behind his ear. 

He doesn’t even make a sound. As horrifying as the noise he made was when Max crammed his insides back in, she’d rather hear it a second time than this. The sheer lack of response he has fills Max with dread. 

“W-Why is he bleeding?” Mom stares down at Billy, brow furrowing, one hand anxiously fluttering over her chest. “H-He shouldn’t be bleeding.” 

“You just hit him with an axe!” Max gapes up at her mother and can’t help thinking she’s lost her mind. She must’ve really lost her mind. 

“The b-butt, it’s b-blunt, I didn’t think…he wasn’t…no, oh no, is he okay?” Mom’s nervous hand flutters faster, voice small with fear. 

“No! I have my fucking hand in his guts!” Max screams up at her, voice breaking. “You have to call an ambulance!” 

“I don’t wanna go to jail, Max.” Mom brings up the axe again but not to strike. She hugs it to her chest like a frightened child would a teddy bear, rocking back and forth. “I didn’t think it through this far, b-but I don’t wanna go to jail.” 

“We’ll say it was a break-in!” Max declares. “Okay? Some drugged up nutcase broke in wielding an axe. He killed Neil and— and Billy got chopped fighting him off. Starting now that's what happened, okay?” 

“I-I did do drugs. I have drugs on the kitchen table, that part’s true, I…okay...okay, thieves steal things. Thieves steal things, I’ll be right back.” 

Mom ducks down the hall, hops over Neil’s form like a bunny rabbit and disappears. 

“What are you doing!?” Max shouts. “Get it together, Billy doesn’t have time for this!” 

He’s still breathing. Max can hear him breathe in stuttering, harried pants but she’s still keeping pressure against the weird visceral sac that slid out and there’s so much blood. He was already bleeding like a stuck pig, Mom just bludgeoned him and was perplexingly shocked that this resulted in more blood…

Mom comes trotting back, wearing Neil’s watches up to the elbow, jewelry box tucked under one arm. She hurries into the kitchen without a word and then Max hears her going down the basement steps. 

She’s staging a break-in. Jesus. This is really happening. 

Neil really is a chopped up pile of carnage a few yards away. Max’s hand is really halfway inside her stepbrother’s wound, his internals warm and squishy under her palm. Mom had a tooth in her hair. Mom bloodied up like Carrie White, tooth tangled in her hair, just ducked past her to stage a break-in because she killed Neil and hopefully…god, hopefully not Billy too. 

He really doesn’t look good. He’s as white as the Pillsbury doughboy, blood trickling around his ear, into his face. 

“Billy…hey, Billy, can you hear me?” 

He doesn’t answer. Maybe Max should feel foolish for even hoping he would. 

“Okay then. That’s okay, I know you’re gonna be fine.” She swallows. “You’re really tough. Too tough sometimes, like super chewy beef jerky.” 

Max hears Mom jogging up the steps. Then she hears the shattering of glass, realizes Mom must be breaking the backdoor window. That makes sense.

Mom thankfully has the cordless phone when she returns to the living room. The bloody pajamas have been swapped with a sundress she must’ve got while she was in the basement, one of the ones Neil made her pack away because he found the neckline too indecent to be worn by a married woman in public. Neil has a lot of opinions about what her mother should and shouldn’t wear. Neil has a lot of opinions in general. 

Well, had. Not has. Max’s eyes slide back to the mincemeat of a man at the other end of the hallway. Neil can’t have opinions of any kind anymore. 

* * *

Max ices her shoulder as she watches Billy rest, stitched and stapled up, buried under two layers of generic hospital weave and the chunky knit blanket Mom brought from home. She shut herself in the bathroom a little while ago. Max can’t hear her crying but she’s pretty sure that’s why. Max is kind of proud of her, kind of worried about her, kind of mad all at once. 

She doesn’t really know what she feels right now. Mostly relief. Relief Billy isn’t dead. Relief Neil is. 

“Max?” Billy cracks an eye open, peeks her way. 

“Hey.” 

“I’m...in the hospital?” 

“Yup.” This is the second time she’s had to answer this question. Might not be the last, he’s pretty well concussed and they pumped him with something or other fixing up his guts. 

“…you sure?” he squints at her uncertainly. 

“Nah, we're actually on a rocket ship. We’re headed up to Mars.” 

Billy gives her the blankest look she’s ever seen and Max feels a little bit bad. He really is out of it, she shouldn’t be messing with him. Adjusting her grip on the ice pack, she shakes her head. 

“No, you were right the first time. You’re in the hospital.” 

“Oh. Neil fuck me up?” 

That question’s new. “Uh, no. That’s not exactly what happened.” 

“Well, who fucked you up?” He narrows his eyes on the sling. “Who’s ass I gotta kick?” 

Those questions aren’t new. “Nobody’s, Billy. I tried to do a trick on a bogus halfpipe and the boards broke. I fell really hard.” 

“Oh. You okay?” 

“It was just my collarbone.” Like there’s anything ‘just’ about pain that kept her on the floor for hours, about losing her dominant hand for the next six weeks. There isn’t ‘just’ about anything that happened that day or the night that followed it. “I’ll be fine.” 

"Yeah, you're pretty tough. Scrappy lil' shitbird." Billy blinks slowly, eyelids drooping as he tugs at the gray chunky knit of the blanket. “Your mom made this one.”

“Uh-huh.” 

“I like it…don’t tell her. I’ll spit in your gummy worms if you tell her.” With that, Billy drifts, conks right back out. 

Max leans her head back and stares up at the ceiling tiles. She lowers the ice pack. It’s starting to melt. 

**Author's Note:**

> so much for like, just one sequel with recreational therapeutic axe throwing for the whole fam. my priorities smfh. might do smth rly gory and fucked up for femslash feb for this fandom, then i got an abcs of death to complete, uh, got a 20k+ scrapped idea to fully resurrect yet and then i'm prolly gonna be peace out, but axe murder snafu au keeps gettin in my way.


End file.
